Some Shall Win
by miss selah
Summary: The thing about losing is that sometimes, you win. [Nine Rose][Prompt 11: Memory]


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**Some Shall Win**

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The Doctor sat in his tiny room aboard the TARDIS, not noticing the tiny differences that Rose had left in it. While other companions, no matter how close, had never dared to tread in to his territory, in to the place that was _his_, dammit, she walked in with her bright smiles and brighter hair and left her scent and her marks lying around. A splash of color in the corner where she had lost a silk scarf, a flahs of gold by his watch from a strand of her hair.

He was looking at these things, these reminders that times were _good _and that they hadn't lost in a long while, but he all he could think about was when times were worse and victory was no where in sight. Things like the Master. Things like the Daleks. Things like a war that he didn't have a chance of winning anyway.

Things that could make a man go crazy.

Like blast from a battlefield, and like the tears of people he couldn't save, and the strain of immortality as he walked among the tombs.

The Doctor closed his eyes and breathed, letting the moment pass him by before he got up to go in to the heart and. . .tinker. It seemed to be a habit, one that he only barely recognized - when things got bad or he couldn't shake the memories, he tinkered with the TARDIS, the only thing in his long, long life that had never left him and, _Kyrie Elesion_, never would. Even where his planet had failed him, the TARDIS remained, as if in her own machine sort of way trying to remind him that he _wasn't _alone, he was just lonely.

Lonely, he decided, was worse. One could be alone and be perfectly happy till the day they died - he knew a number of people that were _only _happy with their solitude, and only vaguely tolerated other people because they _needed _to in order to survive. For a while, he had thought that he was one of them as well.

But that was in between companions, at the time when he thought that the only reason he had two hearts was so that one could keep beating while the other broke. Time Lord anatomy, he supposed, was made for the heartbreak that immortality enivitably wrought, because no one person was supposed to hurt this bad and still keep on living. . .

Lonely was worse than being alone, he knew, because while one could be alone and be happy, the same could be true in reverse - he could be in a crowded room, a room filled with all the great intellects of all time, and still be perfectly miserable because he was lonely. Because while they were smart and great and good, he was just a nomadic time traveler that couch served through planet to planet in an attempt to fill the void that only burnt orange skies could ever dream of trying.

Her hair was almost the same color, he knew, and when he squinted his eyes sometimes it looked like a sunrise that he hadn't seen in nearly a millenia. . .

If he strained his ears, he could almost make out the soft snoring that Rose Tyler made in the next room. She would like to pretend that she slept peacefully, quietly. . . but nothing about Rose Tyler was peaceful or quiet. Her very presence seemed to demand that the quiet be thrown in to chaos. Sometimes she reminded him of. . . well, him.

Which was something that he never would have expected, because he had not ever thought that he particularly cared for himself. Sure, he thought he was an alright fellow, what with the whole 'saving the universe on a regular basis,' but when he got right down to the fact, he was not immune to his own snarky version of affection that he used to keep his companions at arm's length. As it was, he barely cared to be in his presence and he _was _himself, and he certainly never thought that he would like someone who acted remotely like him. It was. . . disconcerting. He had always believed that opposites attracted, by Rose Tyler had a way of changing his point of view on. . . everything. And anything.

The grids of the floor clinked, the sound only barely muffled by her soft bunny slippers. "Doctor?" She asked, and he prayed that even though he had been crying his face would be neither red nor puffy. "Are you alright?"

He hadn't thought so. He had thought that the pain of losing his planets, his friends, his wife and his children, would never subside. He thought that the pain that he felt for the people he couldn't save, and the companions that had died trying to help him fight a cause that he wasn't even aware that he had, would never stop eating at his heart.

Her hair was a golden halo, lit up only by the pulsing light of the TARDIS's heart, and it made him smile. Something about her was strong enough to be soft, and it was strong enough to make him think that _maybe. . . _

If none of those painful things had happened, he wondered if he could have still been here, with her, remembering corpses and lost souls.

"I'm fine."

And for a change, he didn't think that he was lying.


End file.
